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Me and Maggie the Cat
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Her father-in-law (Burl Ives), bigger than life in his own right, pays her tribute -- "That girl has life in her body" -- putting into words what Taylor meant to movie-mad 20-year-old girls like me, growing up in the sexually hypocritical and repressive '50s when having appetites meant you were bad, bad, bad.
Never ghetto-ized as virgin or sex goddess, Taylor took in
Audrey Hepburn and
Marilyn Monroe and grew them up -- discarding little-girl innocence of both the gamine and airhead variety. Besotted
Richard Burton once accused her of being more of a man than a woman -- and, in the unliberated '50s, we so tapped into that subtext: Taylor played the gender game as though she were as free as any man to pick and choose what gave her pleasure, without becoming a sexual victim. Leveling her measuring gaze at a suitor like a cocked gun, she projected ruthless sexual authority. She'd have unmanned TV's "Mad Men," on the prowl during what would have been her heyday.
I can tell you that any girl fighting the steel bit of that benighted decade's sexual double standard thrilled to the way Taylor let her impossibly lush body (36-21-36) out to play, without fear or apology or regret. For women already locked down, she provided vicarious, big-screen fantasy -- a night out with Maggie the Cat.
Gossip columnist Liz Smith recalls that the instant Taylor and Burton set eyes on each other, they forgot -- or didn't care -- that they were married to other people. During the great brouhaha that followed, the Pope branded "Cleopatra" a "sexual vagrant." Far gone in passion, Taylor wondered idly if she might sue His Holiness!
In her breakout role in "
National Velvet" (1944), a horse named Pie arouses her passion. Watch Taylor cantering on her back in bed, "reins" attached to her feet, crying "Faster! Faster!" and listen to her ardent, "I'm in love with him! This is the real thing!" She was only 12, but there's no mistaking she was already physically engaged by all things bright and beautiful. She was all high color and energy as a prepubescent taken in by the animal magnetism of horse and collie ("
Lassie Come Home," 1943). Scarcely more than half a decade later, in the tender "
Father of the Bride," it's a husband-to-be that so ravishes the 18-year-old that her doting dad (
Spencer Tracy) is dazzled by her radiance.
In "
Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967), after she discovers her husband (
Marlon Brando), a closeted homosexual, has perversely whipped her beloved stallion almost to death, she stalks into a room full of military officers like an avenging Greek goddess in flowing white chiffon. Without a word, she takes her quirt to Brando's face, again and again. The movie's all about libidinous projections, but Taylor plays this S&M moment as an outraged horse-lover rather than a woman wounded by a weak, sexually conflicted man.
I like to think she was a black panther or Black Beauty in another life. Her rich black hair springs up around her face with a life of its own, and those incredibly thick eyebrows and lashes signal animal origins. During the long, silent beginning of "
Butterfield 8," the movie that won her a pity-Oscar , her party girl wanders around a lover's luxe apartment, desperately seeking a cigarette. Thwarted, she lights up a cigarillo, coughs, then chases the burn with a slug of booze from a cut-glass decanter.
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Me and Maggie the Cat, Cont.
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After smoothing expensive perfume over her arms -- she's wearing only a skin-tight satin slip -- Taylor wraps herself in a white cashmere coat with a great white-fox collar. Black-maned, porcelain-skinned, this marvelously sensual creature makes you share her yen for oral gratification, invites you to enjoy the sensation of soft fur on scented flesh. The world -- the movies -- seemed her sweetmeat.
Paul Newman got it right when he admired Taylor as "a functioning voluptuary."
Early on, when she was still slim and new, Taylor could project a faux-British reserve, stroking us with that low velvety voice. But it wasn't long before the ingenue felt free to throw back her head and let rip a shockingly slutty guffaw. Liz was capable of screeching vulgarity and aimed sarcasm and contempt in a dry, high nasal -- like nails being ripped out of wood.
In "
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" her bulging flesh squeezed into skin-tight duds, Taylor collars a young, none-too-bright hunk -- "OK, stuff, let's go" -- for a mechanical bump-and-grind around the dance floor. She manages to convey her weariness with the sexual ritual, her disdain for the man-meat she's using -- and yet, lets you glimpse the lusty broad she once was.
I see
Elizabeth Taylor as an American version of Italy's Anna Magnani, another diva who lived large. But Magnani was allowed to wear the signs of hard-living on her face and body; in Europe, the decay of her beauty gave her sexual and spiritual cache. Not so, Taylor. Her Italianate physicality ripened in fast-motion, speeded up by the gusto with which she devoured life. (And death. When Burton tried one last time to return to his wife Sybil, he wrote in his diary that Taylor swallowed sleeping pills "with gusto.")
In "
Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), she rises Venus-like from the ocean in a sprayed-on white bathing suit, her full breasts and hips and luxuriant black hair a Rorschach of primal sexuality. (Her gay cousin's using her as bait for young men.) But as Taylor's lush flesh metamorphosed from hourglass perfection into fertility goddess excess, Hollywood cosmeticized, corseted and coiffed her into drag-queen caricature. Neither erotic or exotic, her "
Cleopatra" (1963) looks like a plump little mare, gamely lugging elaborate wigs, jewelry, gowns around.
Her extraordinary loveliness and lust for life had to be paid for with illness (broken back, brain tumor, skin cancer, hip replacements, etc.). After actually being pronounced dead in 1960, she wore the tracheotomy scar on her throat like a badge of mortality. Somehow it complemented the beauty mark on her cheek.
Taylor always had steel in her spine. First on the scene when
Montgomery Clift crashed his car leaving her party, she saved the actor she adored from choking to death by pulling out teeth lodged in his throat. Shattered by her husband Mike Todd's death in a plane crash, she armored up in Maggie the Cat, a character with "life in her" to spare. Tennessee Williams, Maggie's creator, might have been thinking of Taylor when he observed that "high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."
Williams' hypersexualized, overheated fictions suited Taylor. Along with "Cat" and "Suddenly," she starred in "
Boom!" (1968), as an aging monster wooed by Death (Burton), and "
Sweet Bird of Youth" (1989 TV movie), as an over-the-hill movie star who buys the favors of a beautiful young man. Who better to flesh out Williams' homosexual parables about beauty used and abused, the link between appetite and death?
Taylor's extravagant looks and ballsy sexuality appealed to men such as entrepreneur Mike Todd and
Richard Burton, egomaniacs and gourmands in their own right. But take a look at poor Eddie Fisher in "
Butterfield 8," cowering in the corner of a couch, limp as a dishrag, while the teasing Taylor comes at him "wild with desire." She was no slouch at channeling crazed viragos, gorgeous man-killing medusas, especially in the '70s and '80s when the movies didn't know what to do with her anymore.
In her eight marriages, this diminutive dynamo sampled a veritable YMCA of male archetypes: the mogul, the pop singer, the great actor, the politician, the construction worker, et al. Like Monroe, she seemed to be searching for her opposite number, someone bigger-than-life who could match her celebrity. Burton came close, but then the two of them simply burned each other down.
I think she found her truest soul mates in gay men such as Clift, maybe
James Dean, and
Rock Hudson -- actors who mirrored her own iconic beauty. They spoke to the part of her that was all earth mother, the wise broad who could gaze into the grotesquely ruined face of
Michael Jackson, acknowledge his dream of looking like her, and compassionately call him "son."
And if ever a woman understood the risks of sexual appetite, it was Taylor, making her the perfect spokesperson, since 1985, for AIDS research. The grande dame famously sold off some of her legendary diamonds for the cause, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored her with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993.
In Steve Ericson's recent "Zeroville," a hallucinatory novel that alleges that the movies dream us, the "hero" sports a tattoo on his shaved head of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, "the two most beautiful people in the movies." The image comes from a delirious moment in George Stevens' "
A Place in the Sun" (1951), when the camera closes in on the two stars' faces, their profiles fitting together perfectly -- like puzzle pieces -- as they sink into a kiss from which they will never escape.
All black-and-white satin, quintessential American Dreamboats, the two are pure glamour. Her eyes half-closed, dark with languorous desire, her face a luminous pool where dreams could drown, Elizabeth Taylor incarnates divine eye-candy for every lotus-eater who loves the movies. "Are they watching us?" she cries. Yes, Maggie the Cat, Liz, Bessie Mae, Ms. Tits , we will always be watching you ... up there in our celluloid dreams, your permanent place in the sun.
